posted 14 years ago
Well I would probably agree that the term SOA is not used as much as it used to be but I would argue that the problems remain the same and are probably more prevalent now than when the term SOA was first coined.
From the referenced article “Service-orientation is a prerequisite for rapid integration of data and business processes; it enables situational development models, such as mashups; and it’s the foundational architecture for SaaS and cloud computing.”.
The ability to define services and connect and re-connect them remains key to building systems that are able to keep pace with the way businesses change these days. This requirement is independent of what technology is actually used to build them. You may be a web service fan and build you services using SOAP/HTTP. Alternatively you may prefer a REST based approach. In the end you're trying to get the job done.
I was attracted to SCA, and hence Tuscany, because it doesn’t describe new communication protocols or implementation languages. We probably have enough of those already. It simply exploits those that already exist and provides a model for describing services and the connections between them.
We’ve found that this simple model is surprisingly flexibly from describing how BPEL processes are connected to the services they orchestrate through to describing the connections between Javascript clients and the back end services they refer to. So while the term SOA may be used less I don’t think this will has an impact on the usefulness of SCA or Tuscany. What it will do is make at look at how we extend the project to include new approaches like cloud.
Simon
